Quote:
Originally Posted by BIC_BAWS
Quote:
Originally Posted by RabidRat
I feel your frustration. Please keep in mind though that perfection is the enemy of good. Imo you're going to have to lower your standards to take your first shot, and let it be a series of smaller steps rather than one huge perfect one.
If you put too much of your energy and hope into one or two major shots, it's going to leave you exhausted and unwilling to make those [perhaps many more] next attempts.
I'm doing ok in my career now, but it came out of 5 straight months of:
200 job applications -> trickling into 20 phone interviews -> trickling into 8 on-site interviews -> resulting in 3 job offers. That was 200 separate applications.
My resume started out super shitty but I just kept refining it as a continued applying and interviewing. It's a long process of iteration and the crucial step is to build the momentum. The other critical steps I bet you know more about than I do - being you were an entrepreneur - learning as you go, and getting back up more determined than ever to keep going, after a door shuts in your face. There are more doors, you have to keep going for them.
You are really motivating and inspiring me with your journey. I genuinely wish you the best in this.
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Thank you. I appreciate the sentiment. I keep hearing about how hard it is to find a job, but I assumed it was for people that doesn't have a ton of experience. However, I'm assuming you have quite a bit and was still running into this scenario. |
Yeah at that point, I'd worked at Blackberry and then Cisco for a couple of years, designing high-speed digital logic boards.
It was wildly unpredictable whether I'd even hear anything back for positions that I was kind of
overqualified for, vs surprisingly getting immediate calls back for positions that I was very underqualified for. The Microsoft Xbox hardware team comes to mind: the engineering manager called me directly and said he was straight up skipping HR because he needed someone and they're too damn slow... and can he just phone screen me right now, and could I manage to fly out in the next couple days? (I got an offer out of that one!)
Also, having been on the other side of it for the last 9 years, it really is completely random and unpredictable what's happening behind the scenes. HR randomly sends us resumes that are hardly related to the position we're hiring for but neglects tons of other really good ones; budgets / headcounts open up and get taken away / transferred unexpectedly; sometimes a horde of very qualified candidates show up and we have to reject a lot of
really strong candidates because we only had the one opening; or there are no decent candidates but we're just freaking desperate to get some help so we take a chance hiring somebody we'd normally never even spend the time to interview. It's really crazy. And it's not a startup / small company thing either: I worked at [still work for] one of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley. Hiring processes are bananas.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BIC_BAWS
Quote:
Originally Posted by RabidRat
edit: your brain is wired for it to be hard to let go of things you already have, btw. i hope everyone gives you a break on hard it is to move on, because you are only being human. the only difference between you and them is your reference point has been skewed to the right by what you've been exposed to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
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I didn't know about this. I thought I just didn't like to lose out on the upside - a hazard of occupation. Fully committing to the choices and adapting project plans to make it work. |
Yep I think it's both. Unrealized upsides, also feel like loss. Especially if you've internalized how it would feel to succeed. Humans struggle to let go of things that they feel they either deserve or already have. Apparently!
Source: "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. He won a Nobel prize for Prospect Theory, which this Loss Aversion plays into. It's a hell of a book all about human behavior (behavioral economics, specifically). I'm half way through listening to the audiobook right now. I've been liking it so much that I bought copies for my parents in Chinese lol.